Keyword Not Provided Clarifications

Two Mondays ago I was validating some analytics tagging on a client site and happened to be one of the first to stumble upon the fact that Google had ramped up the percentage of “keyword not provided.” Since then, there’s been a lot of mis-information about the change being shared on social media, blogs, and conference panels. I’ve spent the last few days digging into the issue, and I want to post a couple of clarifications to help put some of these wild rumors and conspiracy theories to rest.

What Happened? – A Brief [not provided] history

A long time ago Google made a change to their SSL (https://) version of search. Some Background: In general, SSL sites only provide referer data (where the search keyword lives) to other SSL sites. That makes sense from a security perspective – secure sites only share with other secure sites. In the past, Google and Bing and other engines had always done a secure to non-secure redirect within their own site so that they could add back in a referer. This way, marketers were able to get the keyword and referring URL. That’s how SSL search worked several years ago.

Then, along came Google+ and shady marketers realized they could tie visits to their site to actual people and the keywords they used to search the web. Histories could be built and shared. Privacy issues were abundant. To better protect privacy Google made two changes. First, they stopped passing over the keyword for SSL search. Soon after, they switched all logged-in users over to the SSL version of search. This was the first big rise in [not provided] keywords.

As Google continued to push cross-platform tracking, they made it a priority to convince users to log in (and stay logged in) to Google and the amount of [not provided] keywords slowly continued to increase.

In the middle of all of this, iOS6 launched and completely stripped out referrers from safari all together – making Google searchers appear as direct or “typed/bookmarked” in most analytics packages. iOS7 launched and briefly fixed that, but as you’ll see in the next paragraph that didn’t last long.

On Monday, September 23 things took a big change. On this day Google redirected most visitors to the HTTPS version of Google (comically for SEO professionals through a 302 redirect) and not provided keywords increased exponentially. For all Mobile and Chrome searchers, that internal redirect they did to add in the referrer value changed. Google is actually sending different referrers now based on your browser or device. This probably has something to do with the cross-device tracking I’ll mention later.

IE and Firefox web searchers pass a referer string that looks like this:https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CDAQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.com%2F&ei=dURMUpNw1NTJAay9geAD&usg=AFQjCNEp_uq78kGnMkhuOXy9pzXkrZTbuQ&sig2=spcBDqGLMZuQoHfh5CTR6g&bvm=bv.53371865,d.aWc

Given the lack of a “q=” in the referer string, some analytics packages actually started counting these searches as “direct” instead of “not provided.” Perhaps in another post I’ll go into detail about how the different analytics providers responded and handled this change – but if you’re doing any homegrown analytics, please take heed.

So that’s where we stand today. Most Google searches aren’t passing keywords. I say most because there are some exceptions that didn’t get caught in the great 302 redirect. One such example is This Dell iGoogle start page that comes pre-loaded on most new Dell computers. Pages like this will only be live through the end of this month though, so I expect [not provided] to spike again in November when Google kills off the iGoogle project.

Then The Rumors Came

Most major search engine blogs and some mainstream media sites covered the changes and since then the rumors have been flying. I’d like to address several of the things I’ve heard parroted across social media and blogs over the last week.

The Reason For The Change

Contrary to belief, this change isn’t about spiting marketers or selling data. This change is about protecting users privacy. In the past, I was able to write some code to tie your search terms to your Google+ profile and even check a list of pre-determined search terms and websites to see if you’d visited them. I know because I’ve done it (proof of concept only, some of it still works, no I won’t share sorry.)

Then came the NSA and things got worse. We know from the Snowden leaks that the NSA is collecting all traffic crossing the internet. This change effectively blocks the NSA from compiling a history of your search terms as they cross the internet. Now, they’d have to subpoena Google for each account they want instead of just broadly collecting it. Having read some of the lawsuits and objections to the NSA put out by Google,I firmly believe this.

Remember: as SEOs and marketers, we’re less than 1% of Google’s customers. When they make changes to the algorithm or processes they rarely take us into consideration. Their concerns lie with their customers: regular people who don’t know what a referrer string is and have never heard of Omniture or Google Analytics. This change protects those people and makes their searching more secure. Yes it sucks for us in the SEO field but we’re not the ones Google is concerned with serving.

It’s not about selling data either

That brings me to the two main rumors I’d like to discuss. It’s true that Google didn’t strip paid search terms from passing through. They appear to favor their paid marketers here – its’ very apparent. What they aren’t doing though, is selling the keyword data back to us nor are they only providing it to advertisers. Advertisers only get paid keyword data. They don’t get SEO data either. I’ve heard rumors that adwords now includes SEO data. It does – but it’s pulling that trended data straight from Google Webmaster tools. Advertisers aren’t being given access to any data that Webmaster Tools users don’t already have.

Google Analytics Premium doesn’t have the keyword data either. I’ve set up GA Premium for customers. It uses the same tagging as regular GA – it just has an actual account rep, more custom variables, and doesn’t sample data. (If you’re not getting millions of visitors, you haven’t run into the data sampling problem with regular GA.)

I also firmly believe that Google has no plans to provided a paid tool for SEO keyword data. It just doesn’t make sense. It’s not scalable or robust enough, and the amount of people they’d have to dedicate to a low-revenue producing (compared to every other product) wouldn’t justify it. Maybe they’ll prove me wrong, but I don’t see the ROI in it – especially not after the PR backlash it would cause.

It’s not an attempt to drive people to Adwords

There’s lots of people claiming this is an attempt to force people to use Adwords. That doesn’t make sense to me and it appears these people didn’t really think through their argument. There’s lots of people quick to call conspiracy theories, but often times these theories don’t hold much water.

Why would not knowing the keyword force someone to advertise? Are they arguing that people will say “oh, I don’t know how many clicks I got on my natural listing so I better give up on SEO and only do paid so I can measure it?” I find that absurd. If I rank #1 for a term, I’m not judging my decision on whether or not to do paid based on measuring clicks by keyword. I’m doing it by ROI – and I can still measure ROI by the page and by the channel.

When I advertise, I advertise by product not by keyword. Even without keywords I can still measure the conversions and profit of each product by channel (natural, paid, display, etc) It doesn’t change what we do or how we do it – it only changes how we report it.

Reporting Changes

Keyword Not Provided is not the end of the world. It doesn’t really change SEO. We still do research, we still provide content, we still do technical recommendations. The only change here is how we report SEO. Instead of keywords and ranking reports we’ll need to move to product based, page based, conversion based, or any number of more actionable reporting. This is a good change. Sure, it’s a lot of work but I think the quality of reporting and insights gained from that reporting will greatly increase because of it.

What’s Next?

Right now, keyword not provided is over 70% for many sites. I fully expect it to grow to 100% within the year. I also expect other search engines to follow suit – especially if this is sold in mainstream media as “protecting user privacy.”

Not only that, but I also expect browsers to make some user privacy changes too. Third party cookies will soon be a thing of the past. Google’s already started working on their own solution to track users across devices. Follow that closely.

Another change I expect browsers to make is to the http_referer value. If you read the mozilla forums the idea of removing it completely pops up every few months. Given recent privacy concerns, I expect browsers will stop passing this altogether. Then, we’ll really have some issues reporting SEO.

No, it didn’t kill SEO

SEO isn’t dead though. Keyword Not Provided didn’t kill it and neither will third party cookies or http_referer changes. As long as people use search engines there will be value in optimizing for them and there will be ways to measure that value. Those ways will change, probably drastically, but that’s why the field of SEO is so exciting.

Ryan Jones is an SEO from Detroit. By day he works as a manager of SEO & Analytics at SapientNitro where his team performs SEO for Fortune500 clients. By night he's either playing hockey or attempting to take over the world with his own websites - which he would have already succeeded in doing had it not been for those meddling kids and their dog. The views expressed here have not been paid for and belong only to Ryan, not any of his employers or clients. Follow Ryan on Twitter at: @RyanJones, add him on Google+ or visit his personal website: www.RyanMJones.com

Comments

Why you don’t have comments on this, I don’t know, but I love you. 🙂 Seriously good stuff here and you should be on the future of SEO panel at SMX right now discussing this stuff. In your absence, I’ll bring the sexy.

I wish I was at SMX with you guys. I’ll have to wait until Pubcon to see everybody. I’m confident you can rock the sexy way better than I can though. Thanks for the comments. If I get time I may clean this up, add in some info about cross device tracking, share the statement I’m giving to clients, and talk more about how I’m changing reporting.

The only way to see the conversion potential of a keyword will be by paying for it so you can see that this keyword had this amount of traffic and converted this many times. Then you can work out ROI. How can you do that from organic search when all you can see is “not provided”?

Obviously people aren’t just going to give up SEO when they are still getting valuable traffic from it but it will drive people to paid search so they can see conversion rate/value at a keyword level to know what keywords to focus on for SEO, right?

I think when we start looking at conversion by keyword for natural search, we’re going too granular. Sure, we’ve all done it, but I don’t think we’re losing as much as we think we are. I think when we step back and look at conversion by page we’ll find that there are more actionable changes we can make to increase that. We’ll still know which keywords drive to that page, and in reality they should all be similar. If we’re getting vastly different keywords to the same page then we have a much bigger opportunity to tackle.

Interesting point Ryan but I think effective content strategies rely on knowing what user intent is. Knowing user intent requires knowing what keywords people are typing in (and on what device/location..). if I didn’t have an idea what keywords and groups of related keyword themes were converting best on my websites I would find it hard to implement effective SEO as I’d be guessing what the people searched for who ended up converting. That’s why if I had “not provided” across all of organic keyword data I would trial paid search campaigns to see what my keyword conversion rates were and then using that and potential traffic i’d create my content strategy. When one or two positions lower can cost you 20-40% in traffic I couldn’t afford not to know exactly what was converting the best.

Really good read. Though I’m with Brian on his point on content strategy. In many cases goal conversion by KW can be too granular but not within high volume e-commerce/lead gen terms. I want to know that samsung lcd tv converts with higher margin and volume and that I should be optimising against this rather than samsung led tv. Yes I can use rank info and landing page but I don’t want to make assumptions when back ordering stock and working supplier relationships. I’d likely be running PPC anyway so would use this data as an indicator but as you’ll likely know, customers often cross between channels whether they’re trackable or not and you’ll lose the multi-attribution affect of your KW across SEO/PPC channels.

Also with missing out on intent, for which 2 related KWs could deliver different goals it will likely affect on-page optimisation. If I rank for “iPhone 6 Review” and “Buy iPhone 6” (a product page) how do I know how best to tailor the page? If the majority of “iPhone 6 Review” hits bounce because the copy is below the fold, yet product sales are ok as “Buy iPhone” hits convert, I’m missing out on potential extra business as I’m missing this data. I could change my page or develope a separate iPhone Review page to funnel traffic into. It’s a fictitious example but one I feel could impact sites that use KWs to manage intent, grow their content and optimise the journey using organic search data.

So, I would argue that having “led” and “lcd” on the same page presents you with an opportunity to break those out and offer more details about each on seperate pages. Same thing with your “buy” page and your “review” page. Instead of putting the copy below the fold, put a “review” section below the fold and link it to a full on review page that can rank. You can fix most of those things with a better content strategy.

“So, I would argue that having â€œledâ€ and â€œlcdâ€ on the same page presents you with an opportunity to break those out and offer more details about each on seperate pages”

Unfortunately it doesn’t work out in practice like that when you have a product listing page which, despite having a separate product description page, you still attract organic traffic to the lister. I’m giving examples here but the fact is that KW data, whether organic or paid can play an important role in the way you optimise the page. I simply disagree that it won’t have much of an impact on conversion rate optimisation and thus back to SEO.

” Same thing with your â€œbuyâ€ page and your â€œreviewâ€ page. Instead of putting the copy below the fold, put a â€œreviewâ€ section below the fold and link it to a full on review page that can rank. You can fix most of those things with a better content strategy”

I disagree with this having optimised Ecommerce product pages and tested reviews on separate pages, it is far easier/more lucrative to have product description and product review copy on the single page for SEO purposes and for conversion purposes, than two separate pages.

About Ryan Jones

Ryan Jones is an SEO from Michigan. Ryan works as an SEO manager at SapientNItro. Ryan also runs several websites of his own. [More About Ryan..]